Engaging History

...In calling for controls on unrestricted capitalism, modern liberals have no reason to feel apologetic or ashamed...

...Schlesinger is never less than a partisan, but in the best of the essays he manages to transcend partisanship...

...At such times he gives us engagi history at its finest—scholarship as a public service...

...Schlesinger has never been shy about showing his colors— no modernistic gray on gray for him...

...A virtuoso Schlesinger performance is "The Future of the Vice Presidency," a scrupulous analysis of the changes that peculiar position has undergone in the 200 years of the nation's existence, ending with the determination that it has not changed enough, since abolition would be the best change of all: "There is no escape, it seems to me, from the conclusion that the Vice Presidency isnotonlya pointless but even a dangerous office.' A sufficient number of energetic and articulate men have been frustrated in it to provide Schlesinger with a full complement of appetizing quotations...

...Other chapters of The Cycles of American History— "America and Empire," "Why the Cold War?," "After the Imperial Presidency," "Vicissitudes of Presidential Reputations"—are also good...

...Both are burdened with the charge of haute vulgarisation because they write for general audiences (one is tempted to say "real people") instead of for the members of their respective guilds...

...Even for so accomplished and knowledgeable a craftsman as Schlesinger, however, engage history is a tricky business...

...Because each swing lasts about 15 years, a complete cycle takes approximately 30 years...

...Schlesinger's latest volume, a collection of 14 recent and revised essays entitled The Cycles of American History (Houghton Mifflin, 473 pp., $22.95) succeeds and fails...

...Here, Schlesinger argues that American political history constantly oscillates between periods of liberalism and conservatism or, in his current language, between periods of public purpose and private interest...

...In his Memoirs, published in 1952—Schlesinger has reminded us on more than one occasion—the President whose name became synonymous with callous indifference to economic despair declared that during the Depression "many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples...

...You and I have no interest in power," Justice Felix Frankfurter once told the journalist Richard Rovere, "but Arthur loves it...

...His three volumes on the Administration of the second Roosevelt are the closest any serious contemporary author has come to giving us a modern morality tale...

...Along the way, he takes a swipe or two at the neoliberals, whose Reaganesque appeals for reduced government consist of much noise and little content...

...He likes to be near it, he likes the feel of it, the smell of it...

...they have a long and honorable heritage to draw on...

...No writer today comes closer to Walter Benjamin's goal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotes...

...it appeared 40 years ago in The Age of Jackson and derives ultimately from an argument by his father, a renowned historian in his own right...

...Readers learn what the weather was like on the day Jackson was inaugurated, what outgoing President John Quincy Adams had been reading the night before...

...Schlesinger's opinions on the Constitution, the Electoral College, nuclear arms and revisionist historians of the Left and the Right are erudite and often wise...

...Yet somehow Schlesinger always seems to have exactly the right quotation at hand...

...Schlesinger vividly sets scenes through the accumulation of mundane details...

...The work that first brought him to prominence, it has frequently been noted, was as much about the post-World War II America in which it appeared as about The Age of Jackson...

...Evil is embodied in the upholders of privilege, position and the status quo: Nicholas Biddle, the lofty, arrogant president of the Bank of the United States in the era of Jacksonian democracy, or pigheaded, self-righteous Herbert Hoover, who went to his grave believing he had battled stoutly to save the country from socialism...

...In truth, Schlesinger cannot possibly know how many "chances" the political system had left in 1932—no one can— but his description gives weight and contemporaneity to the ghosts of the past...

...is our foremost example of the historian engage, a scholar who has yearned to make a mark in the public arena no less than in the academy...

...In a typical Schlesinger chapter, a concept will be illustrated through a personality, and a personality captured through a comment...

...He is a master of the pithy quotation, able to draw on others' remarks for humor, substance, color, immediacy...

...It has a surface plausibility, since ins and outs have tended to rotate office with some degree of regularity throughout U.S...

...They chartered corporations as semi-public institutions, and regulated them closely for the common good...

...Shoeboxes of notecards must fill every closet in his house...

...But by reducing common sense to a timetable, substituting a self-generating mechanism for the complex interplay of human agents and social forces, he strays from reality into realms of mysticism...

...Above all, Schlesinger invigorates his texts with the statements of the players themselves...

...Surprisingly, among the least effective essays is the one that gives the book its title...

...In the ante-bellum years, the states built roads, canals and bridges...

...His books abound with heroes and villains...

...history...

...If the trains continue to run on time, according to this dubious theory, the liberal express should be pulling into the station around 1990...

...His highest praise is reserved for the wealthy and high-born who have elected to desert their class in order to defend the common man, American analogues to the socially conscious conservatives like Disraeli and Shaftesbury in Britain...

...The exaltation of laissez-faire into a quasi-official creed was a conjuror's trick," states Schlesinger...

...The time of patience was running out," Schlesinger says of the mood surrounding the Hoover-Roosevelt contest, "1932 was providing a last chance for politics...

...The progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson was followed by the normalcy of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, which was succeeded by the New and Fair Deals of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, and so forth, down to the present era of conservatism that actually began under Jimmy Carter, "the most conservative Democratic President since Grover Cleveland...

...Even when he writes about events of two centuries ago, Schlesinger does so with an eye on the present, as a spokesman—his opponents would say propagandist—for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party...

...Far superior is the chapter "Affirmative Government and the American Economy," where Schlesinger reminds us that government intervention, not laissez-faire, is as American as apple pie...

...The notion of cycles is not new to Schlesinger...

...Schlesinger would have been better off dropping the whole thing in 1945...

...Conflict is established by concentrating broad tendencies and complex issues into a single occurrence or moment of tension...

...Others, though, settle for attacking straw men or, worse, soundlikesermonsbyabeleagueredpreacher eager to comfort his nervous flock...

...they are the reflections of a man who possesses the long view and is capable of imparting it to others...

...It succeeds when the events of the past are used to illuminate the concerns of the present, fails whehtheconcerns of the present overwhelm the events of the past...

...As Schlesinger observes, the Reagan "Revolution" is basically a replay of policies tried out in the 1920s and 1950s and found wanting in the 1930s and 1960s...

...The core of that talent lies in his outstanding ability to dramatize, to make distant events live...

...Thees-say is an instance of an embattled liberal who, in his search for light at the end of the tunnel, tries to force history to do too much...

...Let the comment of Wilson's Vice President, Thomas R. Marshall, stand for the rest: "The only business of the Vice President is to ring the White House bell every morning and ask what is the state of health of the president...

...That Schlesinger is nonetheless one of our most honored professional historians—the recipient of a National Book Award and a couple of Pulitzer Prizes—is a tribute to his considerable talent...

...and when he affixes to the fundamental political cycle separate rhythmic patterns for foreign policy and national identity, readers may well begin to feel that they have wandered into apre-Copernican world of wheels within wheels...

...The Legions of the Lord in the Schlesinger oeuvre are led by the champions of democracy and the needy: Jefferson, Jackson, the two Roosevelts, and, of course, John F. Kennedy...

...The book may be taken as the testament of a confirmed liberal forced to endure the Age of Reagan...

...were with the 'natural aristocracy.'" Such forthright partisanship is not the manner of doing history taught in our graduate schools, and Schlesinger, who in the past has attacked the narrowness of his profession, cannot be much more popular with his fellow-practitioners than is his friend John Kenneth Galbraith among academic economists...

...At the Federal level, George Washington's Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, established an activist tradition that was carried on by Henry Clay (who, it is worth remembering, was Abraham Lincoln's favorite politician...

...That year's election becomes as highly charged as some current crisis from this morning's newspapers...

...Its discussions of foreign policy, political parties, the offices of the President and Vice President, and the role of government in the American economy strive to maintain the faith, to offer readers of a similar persuasion hope for a liberal revival and the rudiments of a program for the future...

...The historian George Bancroft, a Jacksonian radical, is applauded for his noblesse oblige since all of his "normal allegiances...

...Anyone who has ever attempted to write in this fashion knows how difficult it can be to find an appropriate line for a narrative, one that is lively and at the same time speaks to the point, heightening the drama...

...Several of the chapters skillfully demolish regnant misconceptions of the conservatives with a careful recitation of the historical facts...